David is doing the full review on this cartridge so
I have the luxury of a pre-emptive strike without the grind and boilerplate.
Life is good.

When my pretty, but incredibly unreliable and
fragile Wilson-Benesch table coughed up its guts and quit (ok, it MAY have
gotten slightly dropped in moving, but everything else survived just
fine), I managed to talk Jennifer Crock of JENA Labs into building me a plinth
for a Technics SP-10. Perfect table for me. No fuss, no muss. Of course,
Jennifer never does anything in a perfunctory manner, so what I got was a black
star Corian® clad, multiple material, resonance cancelling, heavy as crap
plinth, the Technics, and an SME model 10 arm.

No, it ain't a Walker Proscenium, but it sounds
damned good.

I like Benz cartridges, although the nudie ones give
me the shivering horrors; and for good reason . . . after setting my table up in
my new house, I found the exposed member of my Benz Glider had been scraped off
in the process ....................ARRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH.

Ah well, c'est la poisson.

Fast forward and I am assembling an ambitious review
series that moves forward driven by the Cardas and a BAT VK-P-10 SE phonostage
through what will hopefully be a set of Jenna Labs prototype speakers.

But, this will take a long time ...and David needs
me.

The Cardas

If there is ANY benefit to getting older, it is not
getting wiser; one simply knows some things more easily. There is more known
territory.

First of all, I think that balanced phono stages are
such a good idea. No hum. None. Go ahead; put your ear up to the speaker. The
very slight wash of cosmic background white noise from the electronics, and that
is it. I have too many times sat with an ecstatic, but sadly misguided
audiophile, gushing about the sound of analog, and between each cut is the room
filling sound of HUM. If there is any humming in my listening room, it damn well
better be coming from something that is respirating too.

And of course, a relatively modest output MC cart
requires a butt-load of amplification along the way. Teensy tiny signals, made
WAY bigger. I dunno, sounds like a recipe for noise to me.

So, I will spend a considerable amount of time on
the BAT balanced phono when I do the full review, but suffice it to say
...yummy, yummy, and dead quiet.

The Cardas clicks in for me without fanfare. I am
not impressed. I am not wiggly. I am not distracted; smoke and mirrors do not
dazzle me. It does not stand out. It is NOT hyper-etched reality. I hear my
records with no distraction. It is neither warm, nor is it cold. It is neither
veiled nor hyper-detailed. It is correct, balanced; musical ...even how it
physically sets down on the record pleases me, as odd as that may sound.

From Eddy Arnold's, Cattle Call, to an old
mono recording of Furtwangler doing Gotterdammerung, from Pure Prairie
League to John Klemmer, it simply does not matter. Everything is enjoyable.

Perhaps because I am old and near death (he winks,
sardonically) I breathe a sigh and wish I could live quietly with this
combination in my listening room from this point forward. I am replete. I am
satisfied. I am loved. I want for nothing.